Detention environments, such as a jail, prison, detention facility, secured hospital, or addiction treatment facility, house large populations of individuals in confinement, which presents unique administrative challenges. Notably, detention environments require additional levels of monitoring and oversight that are not required when similar services are provided to other populations. In monitoring and overseeing a detention environment, a verification process to establish the truth, accuracy, or validity of an individual's identity is typically required.
In detention environments, detained individuals frequently desire to contact individuals outside the detention environment (outside parties) such as friends or family members. Many detention environment facilities use an allowed contact list to control whom a detained individual may contact on the outside. Allowed contact lists of this type are sometimes referred to as PAN (personal allowed numbers) lists. Lists of this type help prevent inappropriate communications between detained individuals and outside parties who are not deemed appropriate for contact, such as victims, witnesses, judges, and facility staff and their families. For a detained individual to add a name to their allowed contact list, the detained individual is typically required to fill out a paper form or otherwise communicate his request with detention facility staff.
The verification process for verifying the appropriateness of these requested contacts, when it is performed, typically falls on already overburdened facility staff. For example, to manually verify a proposed contact, staff may need to research the individual or phone number in a number of different databases. The staff may also need to call the proposed phone number. The accuracy of the information that is provided relies on the honesty of the individual who provided the information (i.e., an inmate who is dishonest or may not know the correct spelling of the outside party's name), or it may rely on public records associated with simple contact data such as, for example, the registered owner of a telephone number.
Some existing PAN processes require a friend or family member to fill out a form containing, at a minimum, his or her own name, a contact number or email address, and often additional information, such as, for example, a date of birth or physical address. If a form is used, the information is typically vetted by facility staff. Sometimes, the information is simply approved when time or labor is not available. The vetting of requested contacts by staff is time consuming. If forms are filled out by hand, they are usually hand-typed into a computer system for tracking and processing. To fulfill their obligation to the courts and the public, facility staff check the information to ensure that: a) a potentially wide range of conditions are checked and confirmed, and also result in permitted contact, b) the contact or the owner of the contact number matches the information provided, and c) the intended contact grants permission to be contacted by or communicate with the inmate.
The above described processes are overall burdensome, time consuming and subject to errors, which is undesirable. As such, there is a need and desire for a better system and method for creating, monitoring and verifying personal approved number lists, particularly for a detention environment.